It is well known to use a projector to project information for display to a user. For details on such prior art, see an article by Mistri, P., Maes, P., Chang, L., entitled “WUW—Wear Ur World—A wearable Gestural Interface,” CHI 2009, Apr. 4-9, 2009, Boston, Mass., USA, 6 pages, that is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
Projection of information as described above raises several issues, such as lighting conditions. Several such issues are addressed by use of Time of Flight cameras, e.g. as described in the article entitled “Picture Browsing and Map Interaction using a Projector Phone” by Andrew Greaves, Alina Hang, and Enrico Rukzio, MobileHCI 2008, Sep. 2-5, 2008, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 4 pages, that is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. For additional information on such background on identifying hand gestures, see Mitra and Acharya, “Gesture Recognition: A Survey”, IEEE transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics—Part C: Applications and Reviews, Vol. 37, No. 3, May 2007, 14 pages that is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
In prior art, information may be projected on to a three-dimensional object, as described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,905,610 by Shapiro, which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety. Specifically, Shapiro states in column 4, lines 20-26 that an “image may be pre-distorted based on three-dimensional information, environmental information, etc. See operation 310. In one embodiment, the pre-distortion may involve an inverse model of the three-dimensional object while calculating the image to be projected.”
Use of Shapiro's method appears to require user involvement, as described in, for example, column 4, lines 27-34 which state “As yet another option, the user may optimally position the projector and the three-dimensional object at this point. This may be accomplished, for example, by projecting a marker (e.g. cross-hair, etc.) indicating a center of the image that will subsequently be projected. To this end, the marker may be manually aligned with a center of the three-dimensional object, by physically maneuvering the projector and/or three-dimensional object.”
When physically maneuvering, it appears that Shapiro's user is manually selecting an object's surface on to which an image is to be projected, and manually aligning that selected surface to the projector. Thus, what is needed is a method to automatically select a surface in a scene of real world, for projection of information as described below.